• Boz (he/him)
    link
    fedilink
    21 year ago

    …so the endgame here is bots that can make purchases, but immediately return what they bought for refunds?

    • @Buckeye
      link
      31 year ago

      Lol I guess maybe! My industry isn’t set up that way (I don’t work in retail e-commerce) but that’s obviously the bigger ad targets on social. Retail can definitely track return metrics though.

      I think it would be hard to get bots past most sophisticated purchase data tracking, but it depends on what you target for that tracking. Like I know a lot of TikTok marketing is built around understanding you aren’t going to get a lot of click throughs on the ad but it is about building brand awareness. If you are just looking at impressions it is a lot easier for bots to sneak in.

      • Boz (he/him)
        link
        fedilink
        21 year ago

        I would definitely expect purchase tracking to be stricter than ad view metrics, yeah. And I know a lot of companies that used to have customer-friendly return policies have rolled back most or all of those policies (with or without non-enhshittification reasons). So I was at least partly joking, though I am getting less and less surprised about what bots are able to do. AI technology advancement just keeps accelerating.

        Good point about brand awareness. In all seriousness, I think there’s psychological research suggesting that brand awareness is valuable in and of itself, though I think there’s a limit to how negative the publicity can be and still be valuable to brands. Otherwise, I don’t think there wouldn’t be the concept of “brand safety” for ad placement.

        I feel like bots are basically the optimal tool for cheating automated systems, since it seems reasonable to fight automation with more automation, like the cat-and-mouse development race for captcha. I don’t have the technical expertise to back that up, though, just a general feeling that Murphy’s law applies to all engineering.